INSIGHT 04Â / RESILIENCE / 4-MINUTE READ
Before You Ask for Resilience
By David SavioÂ
Do not strengthen people to endure what should be changed.
The team that kept absorbing the change
Every Friday afternoon, a team received a new priority. Each Monday, they reorganised their work, reassured stakeholders and found a way to deliver.
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They became remarkably adaptable.
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They shared work, stayed late and protected one another from the worst of the disruption. Leaders praised their resilience and offered a session on managing change.
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The session was useful. People learned techniques for regulating stress and maintaining perspective.
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Then Friday arrived, and the priorities changed again.
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The team did not lack resilience. Their resilience had become part of how the wider system avoided confronting unstable decision-making.
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What looked like strength was also compensation.
What this reveals
Resilience matters. Human beings need the capacity to recover, adapt and continue through difficulty. Appropriate challenge can develop confidence, learning and future capacity.
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But resilience should not always be the first question.
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When people are struggling, the quickest response is often to ask how they can cope better. That may be necessary, but it places the starting point inside the person.
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Conditions Thinking first widens the inquiry:
What is this person or system required to adapt to?
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Some adaptations support growth. Others help people endure conditions that remain harmful, poorly designed or unnecessarily depleting. Silence can be an adaptation. Overwork can be an adaptation. Lowering expectations, concealing fatigue and relying on a few experienced people to rescue the system can all keep work moving.
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The fact that people can adapt does not tell us whether they should keep adapting in the same way.
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Nor should attention to conditions deny personal agency. There are situations we cannot immediately change. Individual strategies, support and recovery may be essential. The deeper discipline is to hold both realities together:
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Support the person.
Examine the conditions.
Conditions Thinking practice
When resilience becomes the proposed response, ask in this order:
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What demands or experiences are people repeatedly adapting to?
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Which of those conditions are necessary, developmental or temporary?
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Which are avoidable, harmful or the product of weak design?
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What support and recovery do people need now?
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What requires redesign, clearer boundaries, different resourcing or escalation?
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Resilience becomes more ethical when it strengthens people's capacity and agency without becoming a substitute for prevention or responsible system design.
Questions to carry
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Where has coping become the operating model?
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Which adaptation are we praising because it protects us from changing the system?
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Are we helping people recover, or merely preparing them for another unchanged Friday?
The first question is not always, "How do we make people more resilient?"
Sometimes it is, "Why is so much resilience continually required?"
The conditions we create shape what becomes possible.
See Clearly.
Understand Deeply.
Steward Wisely.
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Conditions Thinkingâ„¢ is an organising philosophy for understanding and stewarding human systems through the conditions that shape capacity, judgement, adaptation and possibility.
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​David Savio is the founder of Conditions Thinking™ and the author of Conditions Thinking: The Invisible Architecture of Human Possibility.
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His work helps leaders see beneath visible outcomes and shape what becomes possible. Learn more at www.conditionsthinking.com